


To Wild Homes

by ILookDaftWithOneShoe



Series: The World Today [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Adventure Time AU, Angst, Frostiron Bang 2015, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Insanity, M/M, Mild Gore, Past Character Death, Post-Apocalypse, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 08:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5121632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ILookDaftWithOneShoe/pseuds/ILookDaftWithOneShoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years on, the Swarm is finally dying out and Strange has returned. </p><p>With this, things are looking up for Tony and Nat, giving them the chance to get Loki back and leave what remains of Earth for more civilised (and populated) parts of the galaxy. </p><p>But hey. Things are never easy as they first sound.</p><p>The final part of this Adventure Time AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Wild Homes

**Author's Note:**

> I had what some might call good luck in being the first person to post their Frostiron Bang piece! So here it is.
> 
> Thank you so much to my artist, the amazing Ida at swevenzre.tumblr.com , whose lovely art is embedded in the writing in the appropriate place. You have a lovely style and it was a pleasure working with you ^.^
> 
> And thank you to my beta, gamesandgoldenapples.tumblr.com, who was called up on slightly short notice and did a great job fixing up my storytelling errors, which are many and varied. Anything remaining is my fault, particularly the New Zealand spellings.
> 
> Warnings are in the tags!

Natasha did not like potato salad. It was fucked up. She had put a big sign up in Tony's kitchen that MAYONNAISE IS ILLEGAL IN OOO in spiky letters. Underneath it said in a finer scrawl _big sister is watching you._ Oddly, Tony had signed off on it.

She had, however, come up with over one hundred other ways of preparing potatoes. Her personal favourite currently involved garlic, olive oil, and crispiness. Her personal gardens mostly grew potatoes.

It was a good life, nutritionally. The rest of her life was a bit more variable.

She had now lived in Ooo for two years. Her opportunities for actually seeing her sign on Tony's wall were limited, given that she was constantly busy. The Iron Maiden of Ooo had a great deal of tasks to accomplish.

Her last three months had been spent almost entirely in her suit, specially reinforced and shielded so she could survive. Base Camp Red was set in Hawaii, a few hundred kilometres from the Great Hellhole, or Great Pacific Rift if you were Nat and therefore a scientist.

Due to the excessive amounts of steam from the tectonic damage, the surface of the rift could not be mapped from space and so Nat was controlling the drones mapping it from the near surface. It seemed life was developing in the Rift. Lava monsters. It was definitely worth recording now so she could monitor their progress.

She woke up in her special radiation-free hide-out, a luxury that Tony had whipped up for her, and pulled open the plastic curtains. Bright, new light spilled in, the beautiful Pacific sunrise, although the water it sparkled over was tainted and darkened and sat much lower down the beach of the island than it once had. Close enough. Just the feeling of sunlight on her skin was enough to remind Nat she was still alive.

On the other side of the island, a permanent storm of steam and erratic weather patterns was visible in the distance. The first time Nat had seen it, it had filled her with a weird, primeval terror, but it had settled to something like reverence now that she knew what was brewing in there.

After a quick scrub in a chemical shower Natasha got back into the Iron Maiden and headed for the area she was mapping today. The suits had been upgraded a lot since Before, and so supersonic speed was a breeze to reach as she shot over the ocean.

It sort of happened suddenly, which seemed unbelievable if you didn't see it for yourself. Enormous rocks and massive rifts appeared along the ocean, eventually becoming so severe the land split open into a boiling mass. Her breath was taken away in amazement every time.

-O.O-

Tony sat in his lab, fiddling with his latest idea. His abilities to invent were now only hampered by the materials he could get his hands on; he didn't even have a code of ethics. Barring Nat, who had a line to draw at Tony dissecting anything sentient or experimenting too heavily on himself.

Frankly, given that most of his experiments had been run on things had once been inanimate and now moved around by magical means, he didn't see the problem. Was it cruel to lock up a walking road sign in a cage and run invasive tests on it? Nat said yes, Tony said that it was in fact a road sign and odds were it couldn't feel pain.

And running experiments on himself was his own damn business. Testing his own regeneration time was expanding his scientific knowledge.

Since that argument, Nat generally left him to his own devices in the lab and just pretended he hadn't gone mad scientist on them.

The world actually existed perfectly well without humans, in all honesty. Especially with the magic and extreme mutations that had altered ecosystems into coherent units after all the destruction. And the nuclear fallout makes three.

His latest project was robots. He'd already gotten pretty far on the AI and robot fronts during his time at MIT and had built on it when he'd had time in subsequent years, but now seemed as good a time as any to perfect them. He needed some grunts to do the boring jobs, and the drones he currently had were okay, but they were all controlled by JARVIS and Tony didn't want to overstretch the AI.

Tony had built JARVIS, sure, but he'd done it with computers and circuits and whatnot created by other people and other factories, the former of which would be dead and the latter overgrown and thoroughly soiled. And JARVIS ran his manufacturing plant, which meant that if the AI broke then Tony had no way of building the parts to fix his server.

He was working on that too. He just needed to lighten the load by making at least one more AI. This would also give him someone else to talk to, which couldn't really be a bad thing. There were really only so many things you could say to JARVIS and Nat before you starting repeating yourself, and he didn't like the reminder that there was no one else to talk to.

Maybe all the magic was making him begin to transcend humanity. Time felt kind of strange to him now. Before, his eventual death had seemed to rush towards him, warning him constantly how little time he had left. But now it seemed like he was a universal constant or something, unaffected by the passing of ages.

Or maybe he just spent way too much time alone. Whether she'd say it to him or not, that was Nat's theory.

He checked the 'Strange Exchange' camera to see if the wily bastard had appeared in the mortal realm again. The only man who could help Loki and he spent all his time on another plane of existence. Heck, the only non-Hulk human on Earth apart from Natasha and himself, and he wouldn't talk to them. Tony wanted to wring his skinny bastard neck. No hard feelings, of course.

Feeling a throb of bitterness and anger rising in him, he slammed his fist into the table. It was hard to focus when he was emotional, and the pain generally released it fairly effectively. He felt one of his phalanges shatter, waited a few seconds for it to knit together again, and got back to work.

The bots needed to tend gardens and monitor the Hellhole and raid cities and observe wildlife when Natasha was gone, which would be in a few decades at most.

And then what? He supposed he'd be more bored than ever.

Bruce could come back, maybe. That would be nice; he wasn't sure, but he was pretty sure being the Hulk stopped Bruce from aging. And after this much time, was the human Bruce still in there?

If Tony had wanted company in the past he needed only to post a message on a social network, but having three people in the same room now seemed like an impossibility.

But the Geiger counter in Bolivia where the Hulk was showed that the area was now liveable for humans long-term, and Bruce showed no signs of making a bold reappearance. That was it, one could suppose.

At this point, Tony didn't bother specifically fantasising about Loki's return; it just ran in his head like background noise. Everything would be better with Loki. Even back Before, things always had been.

-O.O-

"You're not impressing anyone, you know," Tony told Loki.

A sheet of glass separated them, plus various booby traps that would give Loki a case of terminal death if he tried to lay a finger on Tony. The god was without magic, sure, but he was still a _god_ and so his strength and endurance were superhuman.

"I wasn't trying to," Loki shrugged, then smirked. "And yet here you are."

"I'm here because your latest tantrum has Fury so pissed I'd rather be here than anywhere he's going to be. Three million's worth of damage for a half-hour tantrum, and without your magic? I think the veins on his head are gonna pop."

Loki settled onto his bench more comfortably, his face moving to something like a conversational charm. "What can I say. The moment was right."

"Three strikes and you're out," Tony said, matching Loki's charm by flopping into a chair and sipping a large Burger King coke obnoxiously. Pepper despaired of his rejection of the gourmet. "I would have said no strikes, but apparently if it's not a baseball reference we can't hinge all our lives on it."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"At least you're honest. God of Lies."

Loki tilted a shoulder non-committally. "Speaking of honesty," Loki said. "Aren't you a little scared here without your armour?"

"Nah. It'd be your third strike, and I feel like you don't really want to go home," Tony said.

The god's eyes lowered for just a split second, but Tony noticed. He'd become quite interested in watching Loki recently.

-O.O-

Natasha had now been home from the Rift for three days. That evening, Tony decided to make dinner for the pair of them, which Natasha felt was only fair because he deserved to suffer for how much wider a variety of food he could eat.

Never in her life had she wanted to go vegan, but look at her now. Almost everything she ate was grown in Tony's gardens or was premade and sealed food from before. It was UHT milk or no milk.

She had once eaten powdered lamb in desperation to taste meat again. Never again.

"How're things?" Natasha asked. "No more lab accidents, I hope."

Tony had been getting careless and it worried her. He'd always been careless with his life Before, and even more so afterwards, but it had seemed to her that in the last few months he'd just given up caring. Of course, the man was immortal, but still, the complete dissolution of his self-preservation instincts worried her. It didn't quite say 'suicidal', because he couldn't die, but it did speak of a lack of interest in life.

There were only so many times you could slice yourself open, break your bones, or inadvertently injure yourself in other ways in the lab, before it began to look like you weren't following proper safety procedures.

Tony shrugged. "Nothing worth mentioning."

Natasha could not crush down her doubt entirely, but she left him be, switching the subject neatly.

"Look what I found on Maui," she smirked, sliding a very battered piece of paper towards him. "Valuable information of a now-forgotten culture."

It had on it a picture of a kitten in a pirate outfit, and under that, the caption "Y Dun U Take Me Srsly? I Said WALK PLANK"

"A LOLcat," Tony said, like he was reading Latin or something. "You're fucking kidding me."

"Deadly serious," Natasha said with a straight face.

Like he often did in serious parts of the conversation, Tony finally looked directly at her, and then the pair of them began cackling hysterically.

"I miss memes. 4chan. That was my shit," Tony said.

"I miss TVTropes," Natasha added. "When I was bored in meetings at SHIELD I used to write lists in my heads of character tropes for whoever was speaking."

"Fury's list-" Tony said, and started laughing again at the thought.

Natasha had previously been mostly ambivalent towards Tony; during his poisoning and the whole New York thing she'd thought he was a somewhat sympathetic douche. It was only now, seeing him away from the inflatory effects of others, and of course, away from his own sanity, that she was beginning to appreciate him as a person.

She was also beginning a diary to monitor how off he was getting. She'd rather the ratio of sane to insane beings in Ooo stayed as it currently was, or moved more towards the sane side of things.

Maybe she was getting cabin fever too. It was hard to tell.

"Any updates on what Strange is up to?" Natasha asked. Like she knew Tony was, she was also quite bitter about how Strange seemed to have no concept of solidarity with them. What was he even eating in the middle of post-apocalyptic New York?

Tony shook his head. "Bastard," he said.

"His loss. He's missing out on LOLcats and Nat's special chips," Natasha said, chomping down another one to accentuate her point.

The sudden look of bitter anger that flashed across Tony's face for a moment surprised Nat, but it wasn't directed at her; she probably should have remembered how much more Tony had to gain than her from Strange's company before she brought it up.

Fortunately for her, the people she'd once cared about were definitely dead, and she'd had a lot more experience than Tony of forgetting past lives, so she could allow herself the luxury of moving on. During his lifetime, though, his parental problems and his tiny group of real friends meant that when he'd actually had people he cared about, he cared about them so completely that he'd destroy himself to please them.

Falling in love with Loki and then losing him had, unsurprisingly, torn a hole in his heart.

Natasha, on the other hand, could take or leave romantic attachment. After so many years of not having a choice, of doing it for the mission, the idea that she could have whatever attachments suited her was much better.

That said, she did enjoy couch snuggling while watching movies. Good thing Tony was a pro.

"Nat?"

Nat started. It was so easy to get lost in your thoughts when you were used to being alone.

"More potatoes?" Tony gestured. There was steak sauce on the corner of his mouth. Nat would have killed a man for some steak.

"You know, I think I've had enough potatoes," Natasha said definitively. "I never thought I'd say it, but two years of them only have actually soured me on them a little."

"Shocking."

"I know."

"You could move onto cabbages next."

Natasha gave a little groan at the thought. Not any happy kind of groan, either.

She had always been the type to like a good steak. Thick, juicy, and a little bloody in the middle, with a little bit of pepper sprinkled over the top ...

"Nat. Stay with me."

"Thinking about steak," Natasha said.

Tony snorted. "There's probably some irony to you being disallowed meat, somewhere."

"When I said I wanted to wash the blood of my hands, I meant people blood. Cows I was still fine with," Natasha sighed theatrically.

Jokes about her past had once stung, but it wasn't like they meant anything anymore.

Again, it struck her how easy it was to start thinking like Tony, that nothing meant anything anymore.

"I'm scandalised," Tony said on autopilot as a drone collected his dishes and took them away for cleaning. "You want to watch a movie?"

It was still two hours until dark, when they'd both go to sleep, so Natasha nodded as she stuffed the last of her potato into her mouth.

" _The Muppet Movie_ or _Guess Who's Coming for Dinner?"_ Tony said. "They're the last two left on JARVIS's playlist. I mean, there are more, but I'm trying to keep a system because I watch a lot of movies now."

-O.O-

"You're in my house now," Tony grinned, leaning on the doorframe at Loki, who was leaning against the wall reading.

There were a number of comfortable chairs and sofas in this room, the lounge, and so Tony could only assume the reason Loki was standing against a wall uncomfortably was to make it very clear how unwelcome all this hospitality actually was.

"How perceptive of you," Loki said without moving.

Tony intentionally made his grin even more shit-eating. "And maybe they don't have this wonderful expression in Ass-gard, but here on Earthgard we say 'my house, my rules'. If that doesn't make sense, it basically means I own this place and so instead of paying rent you do what I say."

"I can't explain how irritating that sentence was, so I'll just tell you that what manages to make sense in that mess is best left ignored."

Tony winced. "My feelings."

"Oh no."

"Seriously, though, Prancer, everyone's busy and I hate watching movies by myself, so you're up."

Finally Loki looked at him, directly in the eyes.

"No." he said.

Then he continued reading.

"It's a horror movie. You'll probably love it, you love violence."

"I don't."

"New York says otherwise. That German guy's face says otherwise. Fury's computer lab at the Triskelion says otherwise," Tony said, his voice slipping into a mutter for the latter sentence. "You're just worried you'll be scared and I'll make fun of you, right? Well, I will, but it'll be friendly."

Loki let out a little sigh through his nose. "Is there any chance of you accepting 'no' for an answer?"

Tony shrugged.

"I propose a compromise, then," Loki bargained, his tone still monotonically dry. "I continue reading in the same room as you while you watch a movie, and you don't talk to me."

"Deal," Tony said, grinning. He had just the movie in mind.

Loki tried his best, but as Tony watched _The Descent,_ his eyes kept sliding to the screen and then away haughtily. Tony noticed, as always.

He even got a decent flinch out of Loki at a decent jumpscare, and after the movie, Loki discussed it with him. Just a few sentences, but better than nothing.

-O.O-

They ended up watching both. Maybe they were staying up past their bedtimes, but Natasha was resting her head in Tony's lap and was far too comfortable to move.

Her eyes seemed heavier and heavier as the movie drew to a close, and she fell asleep right there under a woolly blanket that smelled homely. Some little part of her mind wondered where it had come from, given that Pepper and Tony's interior designer wouldn't have approved.

Tony didn't want to move her and so fell asleep there too, greatly comforted by her warm weight against his leg.

Some time in the depths of the night, when you could just see the light from the Rift lighting the distant horizon, an alarm went off.

It was, for lack of a better word, alarming; designed to get the full attention of anyone in earshot.

As the sound screamed out from all around them, Tony and Natasha jolted awake, surprised terror on both of their faces.

"Whattheeverloving-" Tony blurted out. "Oh shit, shit, shit."

"What does it mean?" Natasha groaned, rubbing her temples and then moving to block her ears as the siren split her head.

"It's for the Swarm. It's back. Jay doesn't get stuff wrong," Tony said in a rush, stripping off his jersey and slippers and heading for the lab, his brain cured of sleep-doze by the magic rushing through him. "Maiden up, Nat."

It took Natasha's brain a short while to process that, and she skipped lightly after Tony to catch up with him. "No," she told him bluntly.

"Huh?"

"I saw what those things do to people. They'll peel me out of my suit and rip me apart," Natasha said, fending off images in her mind of Clint, Steve, so many nameless agents reduced to gore. "You're immortal. You go."

Tony stopped for a moment and pondered that. The memories of exactly what the Swarm had done had lost their severity after a very quiet twelve years, but evidently for Nat they stuck in her head. He didn't want Natasha dead, but he did want her at his side.

"Fine. But you use my helmet as your eyes and ears, yeah?"

"I'm with you," Natasha said, her short smile brief and confidential, showing her honesty.

-O.O-

Tony had never successfully tested the limit of his immortality. He wasn't sure if he wanted there to be any, but at the same time, living forever or knitting himself back together after being sliced and diced sounded wholly unpleasant.

The Swarm, back. The few stragglers that hadn't left Earth with the rest of them had been picked off brutally by Loki, so it wasn't one of them; no, they were coming from off Earth.

"What happened, Jay?" Tony asked as he soared out of his house.

"The Bifrost activated, sir, and a contingent of eleven members of the race known only as the Swarm appeared. Comparing their behavioural patterns now to what I have archived, they appear clumsy and sluggish. However, their blades are still plenty sharp and large enough to render you thoroughly ruptured; I think leaving our dear Nat at home was a sensible decision."

"It was hers, not mine. But thanks, old friend. Let's see what we've got."

The Iron Man was currently tricked out with the best weapons in the world, because who knew when Tony was going to get attacked by a sentient, acid-spurting plant that had grown over half of central New York and had a tentacle motif? It had happened before.

He'd done tests. It could kill the Swarm, if need be.

Sure, the nuclear weaponry and associated fallout hadn't helped, but the Swarm were responsible for the death or loss of everyone Tony loved. Except Nat, but how long would she last?

Maybe they weren't truly sentient but Tony could and would hold a grudge. He wanted the satisfaction of killing a few himself, something he hadn't done back Then.

With the upgrades to the suit, the travel to New Mexico was quick. The very idea of the Bifrost activating was mind-blowing, given years of stasis as far as interplanetary happenings went. Just as importantly, the Swarm could operate it and had in the past, and he wanted to have a closer look himself in case it spelled a way off the planet and towards civilisation, even alien civilisation.

Where Jane and Darcy had lived once upon a time, Puente Antiguo, had also been the first place on Earth destroyed by the swarm. Neither of them had been there, but it had only delayed the inevitable for them by a few weeks at most. Like in many other cities, the buildings had been peeled open like plastic food wrap, which was quite an accurate comparison.

The Swarm could fly, but had never been recorded attacking planes or similar, and Tony had never been hurt by one while flying over in the Iron Man, so he kept to the skies above Puente Antiguo and observed from there.

He magnified his vision hugely to get a look at the black, almost insectoid creatures that moved slowly through the streets, ripping into buildings with their long scythed forelimbs and nosing around inside. Looking for food.

When Tony had last seen them, they'd been fast and brutally vicious, not cautious in any sense. And they were too stupid to suspect a trap or anything.

One of the Swarm trailing along at the back fell to the ground and stayed down. In an instant, the other ten moved over and ripped it to shreds, its black blood splattering around them.

"They're starving," Tony realised, relaying his thoughts to Nat. It had been a fear of his that they would return to destroy the progress the planet had made towards recovery, but what he was seeing was a weak band of stragglers that was resorting to cannibalism. He wondered if all of them were like this now, or if this was an outlying group.

"Try and catch one," Nat suggested in his ear. "We can take a better look at it."

"I don't wanna get eaten," Tony muttered as he formulated a plan. Even if it didn't kill him, it would be very unpleasant.

They were slow, now, their hulking armoured bodies trying to conserve energy. He swooped down, grabbed a straggler and threw it to the side with enough force to smash it into a building. Then he activated the laser attachments on the suit and sliced and diced the remaining nine Swarm, the modified lasers that were much improved from his Avengers days cutting through their thick exoskeletons like hot knives through butter, and through anything that happened to have been behind them at the time.

He had no idea how he was going to catch the last one, but forethought was for suckers and so he just decided to see if he could knock it out.

"Jay, jet, please. I'm not lifting this thing home," Tony said, taking a good look around where he threw the Swarmer to see where it had gone.

"Sir, on your left," JARVIS said calmly.

Tony whirled to fire a shot, but it tackled him and knocked him down with a surprising amount of force for something dying of hunger. Maybe this was its last gasp.

Its long scythes ripped into his back and sides and its bladed tail coiled around its midsection as it tried to bite down on his helmet.

"Fuck!" Tony said, the pain in his sides holding him back. He thought he'd been desensitised to it by now, but the burn was still enough to knock the wind out of him. Clenching his teeth and forcing his mind to work, he activated his chest beam and loosened its constricting grip enough to shove it back a little. Then he punched the stupid thing in its gnashing, nasty face, and the increased strength granted by the suit, plus how weak the Swarmer was, resulted in its face shattering under his fist. A few more punches and the thing stopped constricting him with its tail and trying to peel his waist. It dropped to the ground like a big dead crab.

"That felt really good," Tony muttered. He surveyed himself; his entire abdomen had been ripped open and was spurting a lot of blood, but as he watched dirty green sparks flooded across the hole and knitted it shut. "I still got it."

Natasha and JARVIS were both silent and he wondered what the pair of them were thinking.

"Well, dudes and gentledudes, I can't fly home like this. Keep that jet coming, Jay," Tony said, trying to break the silence.

He spent the next ten minutes picking up chunks of Swarm that were relevant enough for analysis, and pondering the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

"It doesn't look very caught, Tony," Natasha said, her voiced tinged with a kind of vicious amusement.

"I didn't know how to stun it, so I punched it to death. And it was cathartic. You have no idea."

"Mm, I'm living vicariously through you."

A quick look around a damaged shop produced a couple of large plastic bins. He rinsed them out and filled them with biological data, aka chunks.

 _"Substitute! Your lies for facts,"_ Tony sang as he worked.

The jet landed soon after and Nat hopped out, evidently having hitched a lift.

"Get in, loser, we're going shopping," Natasha said dryly, her voice rendered robotic by her helmet. The black and baby-blue suit looked almost identical to Tony's, but was a little smaller due to her lighter frame.

"And I have a treat for you," Tony replied, matching her tone neatly and tossing a plastic bin her way.

-O.O-

Investigation of the Swarm proved little. It wasn't Tony's first look at them, but his and Nat's biological analysis equipment had improved hugely in the last couple of years and so he got a much more in-depth reading of the samples.

They were still insectoid creatures that had a semi-metallic exoskeleton and bodies that required a massive protein and energy input to live.

More of them appeared over the next few weeks in scattered bands from various Bifrost sites around world. Tony set up monitoring stations to continue Doctor Foster's work on understanding and activating the Bifrost, while Natasha wrote her usual piles of notes. This was mostly left to Tony, who efficiently killed the starving, aggressive Swarm that appeared and then checked the readings from his scans.

After a bit of practice, and a lot of engineering, Tony found a way to capture one alive and as healthy as they could be.

"I hate them," Natasha said sharply, looking at it hovering in the lab. It was trapped in a spherical force field, Tony's latest and greatest creation. He'd fed it to keep it alive and it was now coiling and uncoiling its tail and gnashing its scythed front limbs like an anxious lion.

He'd never had a chance to see one of their faces close up and still enough for detail; it was a buglike thing, with a few different pairs of shiny eyes and a heavily bladed mouth.

"They look like killing machines. There's nothing warm about them," Tony shrugged. "Call me overdramatic, but to my human senses, they look like the face of evil."

"I don't hate them because of that. People used to say the same about me when I joined SHIELD. But I don't think they can be repurposed," Nat said. Her lips then quirked, and she added "Maybe not the exact same thing about me. At least I didn't eat who I killed."

"So, killing machines, then?"

"I suppose so."

"I've done everything I can with all my scanning equipment. I brought you down here to ask you if there's anything you want to do with it," Tony said.

Nat shrugged. "I'd like to do some behavioural analysis, but it's too dangerous to let out. Just do it."

Tony slipped his hand into the holo-panel, made a few short gestures, and then watched as the Swarmer was incinerated instantly. A surprised sound came from Nat.

"High Europium content in their exoskeletons," Tony muttered as he made a swift hand gesture to get a drone to collect the ash. "Need that shit. It isn't like I've got my own mines."

-O.O-

"Stop staring at me," Tony snapped.

Loki blinked and continued staring.

"Come on. Is one of your god powers laser vision? I feel like you're burning a hole in my back."

A slight huff of amusement came from Loki.

"Oh, fuck you, buddy," Tony said. It was hard to focus on his work with Loki there. He was just trying to get some quality lab time in and the god had arrived in the elevator just to tick him off, as far as he could tell.

The _restricted_ elevator. He shouldn't even have been able to get to this level, and he didn't have his magic anymore, so he must have done it with technical know-how, which, looking at Thor, suggested Loki had more smarts than the average Asgardian.

"You must be smarter than the average bear," Tony finally said, giving up on work. "I know I've already asked, but how did you get into the elevator?"

"I suppose you'll never know," Loki said, continuing his staring.

Tony narrowed his eyes suspiciously, jokingly, and Loki grinned in a way that made his stomach go funny.

-O.O-

Over the following month or two, the random appearances of the Swarm grew more and more sparse until they ended all together. Tony was willing to believe that they had run out of food around the Nine Realms and were dropping dead everywhere.

"They polished off Earth in a fraction of a year, and they've had twelve to polish off the remaining Realms," Tony shrugged. "It's not unfeasible."

The quantity of loss of life didn't hit them in any way because they'd never seen these people and couldn't imagine the loss of something they'd barely known existed. That kind of number was a statistic.

If the Swarm had run out of food in the Nine Realms, then it was safe to start an inquest into the wider world outside of their planet. Tony had been preparing for this possibility for some time; all he needed now was access to the abilities of the Bifrost, and he was thinking that he had enough data to begin work on forcing the Bifrost from this end.

Things would probably be a lot easier if he had access to Jane Foster's notes, but she had been the kind of madwoman who thought it was okay to only have paper notes and they'd all vanished in the chaos of the last decade. She'd already cracked the whole thing at some point, so he was reinventing the wheel.

-O.O-

On one of the bold, grassy plains behind Tony's house, he and Nat were preparing for their first proper test. They'd been working together on this project for the last few weeks and it was all falling into place.

He was wearing his suit for this first test. He wasn't stupid.

"Bifrost test, trial one, in ten seconds," Tony said out loud, so JARVIS could record it and Nat could be warned.

"Don't die," Natasha said mildly. Her expression was impossible to gauge behind her faceplate. "I don't know how to use the coffee maker."

"Ask Jay," Tony shrugged. "Let's do this."

The circle of electronics and various paraphernalia around him looked rather insufficient in terms of taking anyone through any wormholes, but Tony had faith in himself.

Right then, the arc reactor Tony had set up to power the whole thing glowed brilliantly, forcing Tony to blink away tears, and an intense light flared around him, whirling with different colours. With the off-putting feeling of leaving his stomach behind, he was ripped off the ground and pulled into a brightly-coloured nothingness.

He did not appear in Asgard, the land of eternal summer or at least really mild winters. Rather, he was spat out about two hundred metres above the ground of somewhere volcanic and very cold, and it took him a few desperate seconds to un-daze himself and get his shit together sufficiently to not hit the ground hard.

"Jay, where the hell am I?" Tony gasped.

"Iceland, it would seem, sir," his AI replied. His tone indicated no small amount of wonder.

"Hm." It wasn't quite what Tony had wanted, but he'd definitely travelled and travelled fast. "It would be better if it allowed for a return journey."

And with that, he began the annoying flight home.

Somewhere over ocean, JARVIS interrupted the calculations he was running through. "Sir, an update. Your 'Strange Exchange' surveillance system is reporting action."

"What?!" Tony exclaimed. He stopped violently in midair, the lurch enough to push the air out of him. "What is it?" he gasped out.

"He appears to be moving around his house. May I bring up the feed?"

"Go nuts."

Tony's HUD filled with surveillance footage of Strange's Manhattan house. It had once been grand, one of those really old houses filled with classical art and weird-looking metal things that had served a practical purpose back before the invention of various good ideas.

Now the vast majority of the windows were broken, the house was full of filth and animals, and that massive tentacle-vine that plagued Tony's nightmares had established a decent foothold on the bottom floor.

Stark Tower seemed to be where it flourished best. He wondered how that had come about.

On one of the screens, a huge, many-legged bird wandered past the camera, only to be snared by a vine and sprayed with acid.

"Ew."

And Stephen Strange himself, leaning on an upstairs railing and surveying the vine below, his face haggard and sad.

If Tony was a kinder man, he would have taken that piece of body language as a sign that he should stay away, but he wasn't, so he immediately adjusted his course for New York. In under an hour, he smashed through one of the few remaining upstairs windows - because fuck you, Stephen Strange - and went in search of the sorcerer.

He found him arguing with the Iron Maiden, which inevitably happened whenever they were near each other.

The subject was the same as it had been last time; Natasha had forced Strange to save her, costing him the opportunity to do good in other places.

"Look, guys, break it up," Tony said, peeling off his helmet and running a gauntlet through his hair. "No need to fight over me. Lots to go around."

Natasha smirked. Strange looked irritated.

"You are not any more welcome in my house than she is, Stark."

"Well, the vine's probably not welcome either, but it got its tentacles in here anyway and I figure I have the right to do the same."

"You two didn't come here to quarrel with me," Strange said, more a statement than a question.

"No. I want Loki back," Tony stated bluntly. "I think Nat did just come here to pick a fight. We get lonely."

"I came as back-up. First," Nat said.

Strange sighed. "I think that fighting Set for control of Loki is a waste of time."

"Well, I can't think of any other use for my unlimited time, so let's waste it," Tony said sharply. "You're the Sorcerer Supreme of a planet with a human population of three, and you'll be dead or, I don't know, a magic ghost in under fifty years, so help a man out."

Strange clearly thought about it for a few seconds, which wasn't long in reality but certainly felt like a long time.

"Yes," he finally said.

"Yes, what?" Tony said.

"Yes, I will attempt to free Loki." And just because the man couldn't do something selflessly and kindly, he added "With your persistence, I'll have to make an attempt someday. I might as well get it over with."

A resignation victory was still victory.

-O.O-

"Have you left this tower since you got booted here by Saint Nick?" Tony asked. "No matter what your answer is, we're going out today, so get ready, Pixie Stick."

Loki rolled his eyes and sighed, but by now it was an act and they both knew that very well. Somehow over the last several weeks Tony's company had become enjoyable to him, setting off the kind of warmth in his chest he hadn't felt for a very long time.

He was still angry and full of a need to destroy in such a way that people would know it was him, would know his name. It itched his fingers whenever he sat alone, poisoned his thoughts while he slept.

Tony could make it go away. He made him feel like a person, that sickening kind of person who was content enough with their own existence.

Their walk around the park, with Tony pointing things out and making wry comments that brought a wicked, crooked little grin to Loki's face, was one of the first times there was no bitterness curling into his heart.

The day was completed with the purchase of an ice cream that melted onto Loki's hand and left it all sticky, but somehow he didn't _mind_. The smear left on his chin, pointed out by Tony with a laugh, resulted their first kiss that spread warmth and happiness through his chest like a rising fire. Their next dozen kisses against a tree just made it perfect.

-O.O-

"You made it to Iceland," Natasha said once they were in the air and heading away from Strange.

"It's a start. I definitely did the whole rainbow wormhole thing, but our accuracy was just too off. I don't know how the real Bifrost aims, but there's no starting point for inputting the coordinates of Asgard. I have no idea where it is."

"Can't you use the data from the Swarm's arrivals?" Nat asked.

"Well, I would, but I have no idea which Realm they were coming from, and analysis shows they came from a number of different realms and such. I'd be taking a wild shot in the dark, and it's not really the kind of thing I want to fudge."

"No, maybe not," Nat said. "We'll keep trying, though. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to do this; Thor's people invented this and he couldn't work the toaster."

"Loki said that was because it was too low-tech, not the other way round."

"He's literally the patron god of covering his own ass," Natasha snorted.

"And he's coming home tomorrow," Tony said, his voice wistfully happy.

"We hope," Natasha added.

She didn't know what would happen to Tony if they failed to bring Loki back tomorrow. The man kept himself going on a mixture of stubbornness, inventiveness, and longing for his lost love. She had a feeling that if the latter dissolved the former two would shortly follow.

-O.O-

The morning took longer to come than Tony would have preferred. Sleep was purely optional for him because the magic in his system could and did take up the slack, but he enjoyed it for the feeling of peaceful rest he got out of it.

Not that night. That night he was tossing and turning, anticipating the big day, until he gave up and worked on configuring the Bifrost.

It might work. There might be whole future for him in the stars.

The candy people didn't need him anymore. He'd set up a whole new self-sustaining civilisation on Ooo, turned the planet back into a living world, and how many people could say that? But here, with just Nat and Strange, he was just going to get lonelier and lonelier until there was nothing left of him. Especially when they both died.

Not if Loki came back, though. An eternity with that man was what they'd both been wanting.

-O.O-

Once again, Tony was trying to concentrate in his lab, but Loki was distracting him.

It wasn't intentional, this time. Loki was just sitting and tinkering with the hologram displays curiously, but there was something sad and empty in his eyes that worried Tony.

"Whatcha thinking about?" Tony asked, breaking the silence and trying to sound upbeat.

Loki's eyes flicked downwards for a second, probably considering whether or not to lie, but he eventually said "My magic. I don't know if it's ever coming back."

"Give it time," Tony murmured. "Odin probably wasn't expecting for you to find a hot piece of ass on Earth and he's just flipping a coin about whether or not crazy sex counts as redemption."

A weird mixture of fondness, amusement, and general disgust passed over Loki's face, and Tony laughed, which broke the tension.

Loki pulled him down into a kiss, and he continued to be distracted from his work.

Sure, they acted like they were just having some random kind of fling, and that Loki was still a crazy-violent houseguest who hated everyone - especially Tony - and wasn't domesticated at all, but the fact was even the god of lies couldn't pass off his actions as anything else in this case.

-O.O-

Natasha wondered if nihilism was the only way forward in a world like this. It seemed pretty damn likely.

Fortunately for her, she'd always been a little bit of a nihilist and so this wasn't the shock it could have been. It did mean, however, that she had to keep herself busy or else fall into the same kind of distorted mindset as a certain Mr Stark.

The pursuit of the true Loki was a great distraction from her own thoughts. So when the sun came up, she readily rolled herself out of bed, performed her ablutions robotically, and then stretched on an undersuit and smoothed her now-short hair back.

Tony was already in his lab, working hard on something or another. Nothing in his physical appearance suggested exhaustion - the magic took care of that - but the hunch of his shoulders and the driven look in his eyes was enough to let her know.

"Ready?" Nat asked, leaning against the door.

Tony started and grinned, a slightly worryingly eager grin that didn't quite chase the intense look from his eyes. "I've been ready for a very long time."

And with that, he got to his feet. He was already wearing his undersuit and the Iron Man applied itself to him as he packed up. Nat did the same, and the two of them took to the skies in a few minutes flat.

It wasn't the kind of morning that encouraged breakfast.

The Ice King's little haven in the Rockies had grown in the last two years into a sprawling living complex; the arena where he occasionally made his subjects fight each other was just a minor part of it, though it was often full of disgruntled snowmen that had limited mobility and were practically stuck there, making it the population centre.

However, the living quarters for His Highness were in a cave high up on the mountainside, where he spent his time yelling at hallucinations, sending blasts of ice and snow everywhere, and planning new ways to be crazy and emotionally torture Tony.

Granted, he probably did not do that on purpose. It was just a by-product of his existence.

When they arrived there, Strange had already arrived and was gesturing boldly around, the place apparently devoid of Ice Kings. There were a few snowmen, as always, looking generally kind of pissed.

"Where's the boss?" Tony asked one. Funny how his life had come to this.

"I dunno," it drawled, its accent almost too thick to hear through.

"Please kill me," another one said, its voice oddly blasé considering what it was requesting.

Tony shrugged. He really wasn't one to deny that kind of request these days. He repulsor-blasted the snowfolk in the room, feeling a little bad when one screamed "Not me-". Oh well. Snow was snow.

He heard Natasha let out a vague grunt of laughter. When he turned, Strange looked a bit disturbed.

"Chill. I've lived here a lot longer than you. This is par for the whatever," Tony said, laughing with Natasha. You had to see the funny side to survive in Ooo.

A little haughtily, Strange schooled his face into discipline. "Where will we find him?"

"Hold up. I'll do a flyover," Tony said, nodding sharply at Nat and taking off into the air.

The whole area looked mostly pretty similar to how it had looked Before, full of mountains and snow and the like, and thoroughly layered with puffy storybook clouds. A really lovely area, if you cared, which Tony didn't for the minute.

-O.O-

"Come on, dance with me properly, this is pathetic," Tony grinned, taking extravagant steps around Loki, who was looking at him with the same sort of look you give a playful dog.

After a bit more tugging and weaving, Loki finally smiled and started moving with Tony, his hands on his waist.

"We're having fun, aren't we?" Tony teased, standing on his tiptoes to twirl Loki, who was graceful enough to make Tony's clumsy movement elegant.

"When do we not," Loki said, a warm statement rather than a question.

Taking the initiative, Loki dipped him, their faces only inches apart for a second. Tony grinned at him.

"I think my teeth are rotting," Nat said on her way past, teaching Steve how to dance.

"Screw you, Nat," Tony said without breaking his smile, then blurted out "I love you, y'know."

Loki's eyes widened in a shock for a split second before he let out a rough breath, smiled in a way that made the corners of his eyes crinkle properly, and said "I love you too."

They bridged the distance between them and kissed properly, a deep, engulfing gesture. It was only briefly punctuated by Tony's wondering about how exactly this relationship was going to work long term.

Pulling away, Tony felt a real, deep contentment as he gazed into Loki's sparkling green eyes.

But Loki seemed momentarily distracted.

"What is it, babe?" Tony asked worriedly, wondering what could be enough to draw his attention away at a moment like that. "Everything okay?"

"It's nothing," Loki said quickly, tossing the emotion away. But his eyes flickered down to his own hands for a split second, and Tony had seen that look pass over Loki's face so many times in the last few months that he recognised it instantly.

"Your magic? What about it?" Tony said.

"I thought, when I said it -" Loki breathed out.

Tony's heart went cold. "What the hell? You just said that so what, Daddy'd hear you and be proud of you?" Tony pushed Loki away, trying to keep calm and failing miserably.

"No, no! I meant it, my Tony, I mean it with every piece of my heart." Loki's hands rested on Tony's shoulders, and he was convinced by the guilt and regret he saw in Loki's eyes. "I thought that if I managed to say it out loud, the Allfather would hear it and be convinced of my change."

Tony let that run through his mind for a moment before thinning his lips and nodding. "Fair enough. You haven't lost everything, though. This isn't the end of the world."

"No, I think I've gained something," Loki said, smiling through his grief and kissing Tony again.

Later, much later, they got word from SHIELD. A message had been sent via the Bifrost; Asgard had been attacked by extremely powerful but unidentified assailants. The kicker of the message was the conclusion:

_All is lost._

And that was it. Loki was on the balcony, screaming at the skies for Heimdall to open the Bifrost, but nothing came.

That was mid-march. The five weeks between the fall of Asgard and the Swarm arriving on Earth were torture.

Maybe Odin had just never seen Loki happy, what with the situation in Asgard, or maybe Loki was still not good enough in his eyes. They'd never know, and Loki would never get his magic back.

-O.O-

After quarter of an hour of cruising he eventually found him, floating on a little mattress of ice in a sparkling, lovely lake. He almost looked like he was sunning himself, which seemed rather strange as one would imagine that Jotnar would avoid the sun and not really have much interest in tanning. But there he was.

He quickly radioed Nat, and the other two appeared on the bank of the lake with him in a minute or two.

"Right," Tony said. "We need to actually think this through. He's incredibly tough. Think Thor, combined with yourself, Strange, and a Kelvinator."

"Aren't you worried he'll hear us?" Strange whispered.

Nat exhaled through her nose. "He doesn't notice anything. At all. Not 'til you start directly interacting with him."

Strange nodded slowly. He didn't look overly reassured.

"His weaknesses are limited. He doesn't like heat. If you try and just take the crown, he'll attack very viciously." Nat summarised shortly and efficiently, not using his name to spare Tony.

"I'm invincible, so I should do the bulk of the fighting. You said we needed to K-O him first?" Tony added.

Strange, back to business, nodded again in agreement. "You must defeat the vessel first, so I can deal with Set directly. I've been amplifying my power and I believe I am strong enough to win this fight."

"Right. Leave it to me," Tony said, getting to his feet. His armour was temperature-proof and reinforced against ice strikes, and he had several heat-based weapons ready to weaken Loki. "Jay, turn on the toast rack."

With what might have been a sigh, JARVIS activated the coils that would heat the exterior of the suit and prevent frost build-up.

Tony had, in a probably unhealthy fashion, been preparing for this for some time.

Trusting that the suit was tight, he slipped into the lake and jetted along until he was under Loki's little raft. No sense in calling him the Ice King now that they were so close to having him home.

The raft shattered into shards of ice when it was hit by one of Tony's directional missiles. After half a second, Loki's body plunged into the water, instantly chilling it a few degrees around him.

Surprise and fright caused Loki to instinctively blast ice from himself, but the size of the lake absorbed the change in temperature fairly easily. Jetting forward, Tony pulled Loki into a bear hug from behind, and then said "Now, JARVIS!"

The heaters that weren't contacting Loki turned on full blast and heated the water around them rapidly. Loki attempted to fight this with more ice, but Tony had electricity on his side and the water around them made it into double digits.

Tony had no idea how long Loki could hold his breath for, but in this heat and with no warning, he doubted it would be long.

Loki's intense struggling slowed as the last few bubbles of air left his mouth. Not actually wanting him dead, Tony pulled him above water, a mixture of fear, triumph, and horror at what he was actually doing running through him.

As Tony was pulling him onto shore, saying "And that, kids, is where forethought, skill, and planning, come in handy," Loki coughed out some water and opened one eye blearily.

"Robots," he muttered. "Typical. They must have heard about the rave in the jungle."

"What?" Tony said. Loki did not reply, mostly because he'd slumped his head back and apparently passed out. Drowning and overheating did that to you.

"That ... was easier than I expected," Nat said.

"He is kind of not really sane enough to put up a proper fight," Tony said. "It helps that I prepared for this."

"Stop bragging."

"Make me," Tony snorted.

There was a short silence, before Strange deadpanned "Stand back. I suppose that attempting to remove the crown will be the best way to incur Set's wrath directly. And considering how powerful this crown is, as well as what a formidable ally Loki once was, I think safety should be our first consideration."

"Not me," Tony shrugged. "Nat, duck and cover, m'girl."

With a slightly irritated grunt, Nat retreated to a safe distance. She wanted to be in the action which was fair enough.

Strange cocked a hand, magic swirling around it in a faint glow, which was matched by the glow that started around the crown.

It shifted half a centimetre before Loki's eyes snapped open, the white so bright it was luminous. The emeralds in the crown glowed warningly.

The speed at which Loki got up was supernatural at best, his blue lips peeling back to reveal a sharp-toothed snarl. With ice quickly forming around one fist to create a cestus, he darted in for a quick jab at Strange.

"Strange!" Nat yelled, but Strange had already sent out a pulse of magic that shoved Loki back.

Loki - or the thing that used Loki's body like a bugfuck crazy puppet - paused for a moment, pondering Strange. It was the kind of quiet, intelligent look that Loki himself often had and the Ice King _never_ did, the similarity sending a moment's chill down Tony's spine.

Then a slasher smile made its way across, well, the Ice King's face.

What happened in the next few seconds wasn't really clear to Tony, but he broke it down later into a few pieces: firstly, the Ice King did something with his hands that blinded everyone for a moment and wrecked the shield Strange had put up, then sprayed a blast of ice flechettes that ripped into the sorcerer's clothing. With a few wisps of poisonous green magic, the Ice King vanished, appeared behind Strange and shoved a sharp dart of ice into his back. The sorcerer never even had time to save himself.

Tony's brain flashed for the briefest of moments to a dark-eyed Loki pushing a blade through someone else's back, impossibly long ago.

Strange collapsed like his strings had been cut, and Tony realised with a wave of cold nausea and horror that the ice had gone into his spine.

It took him longer than he could be proud of to recover from his shock, and then he blasted the Ice King back with repulsors on full power, which scorched his chest but didn't even knock him down. The King's attention snapped to him, identifying him as the next threat.

"Shit," Tony muttered, and fired a volley of other weapons. "Shittity fuck."

It wasn't that they weren't dangerous, it was that all of them were being absorbed or deflected by a mostly transparent forcefield that seemed to protect his foe completely.

Strange was down, and useless under the steamroller that was the crown's power.

Tony had never known that it had this much punch to it. That said, Loki himself was a very capable channel for magic, and that combined with Loki's Jotun abilities made the Ice King an extremely powerful opponent.

"Tony! Watch out!" Nat screamed. She pointed and fired a missile from her arm, but she was too slow.

Tony flew upwards and backwards, but the Ice King had teleported again, or maybe run supernaturally fast. Either way, he slammed into Tony hard, Nat's missile missing both of them as they rolled forward. He pinned Tony to the ground, his teeth bared aggressively, and his massive strength kept Tony far too still.

Magic pinned Tony flat against the ground, spread-eagled and unable to move a muscle, his vision filled with what had once been his love's face. A blue hand reached forward, gripped Tony's faceplate, and tugged until the whole thing tore off.

Tony doubted there was any point in heating the suit, or firing his chest beam, or anything like that, given how ridiculously powerful Set's self-protection made the Ice King.

"Just kill me," Tony said. "You're the only one who can. It's your magic keeping me here; if you polish me off, that'll be it. And I've had enough."

The Ice King's head tilted, and Tony had no idea who was looking at him: Set, the Ice King, or Loki.

"Do it!" Tony yelled. "If Loki's not coming home, then I don't want to either."

Still more staring.

Tears ran down Tony's cheeks, surprising him. "Please."

Tony abruptly realised that this was why he'd come here: as much to get Loki as to get himself.

The Ice King's face spasmed, like a weird overdone tic.

"I don't want this!" his voice hissed out, rougher and lower than Tony remembered.

"What?" Tony blurted out stupidly.

The Ice King - _Loki_ shook and trembled, his eyes dancing wildly, until the blue ebbed from his face and his eyes reverted from blind white to acid green. "I made my choice, Tony," he said harshly. "You or me. Don't you go back on this now."

"You selfish bastard!" Tony snapped, in shock that he was finally talking to Loki after so many years of pining. "You can't just say that! I need you - what kind of life do you think I live without you?"

"A better one than mine would have been," Loki breathed, and maybe it was true, but Tony didn't want to hear it.

"I gave up myself for you because you're all I have. Everyone I ever cared about and everything I cared about was gone, except you. I'm not all you have. You can do so much, my Stark, but you aren't," Loki continued, his voice firm but threatening to crack with emotion. "Go and _do it._ "

The blue that had been slowly oozing up his throat shot back up again, whiting out his eyes and sending Loki back into his insane stupor.

"I control ice and snow!" Loki - no, the Ice King - cackled as he forgot he was attacking Tony and launched ice volleys at Nat, who swore violently and started dodging.

Tony just lay there, staring at the cloudy sky and letting the tears roll down his face.

-O.O-

The Ice King got bored and confused very quickly, and wandered away, accompanied by several sarcastic snowmen, as was his custom.

Natasha, unhurt thanks to the suit, was propping Strange up and talking to him when Tony came back to himself.

"Can you fix this?" Natasha asked Strange quietly.

The sorcerer had tried to move his legs and failed. The Ice King's strike had been precise and calculated for maximum damage.

"I think so," Strange said, fear on his face. His aloof manner had been shattered by how easily he'd been annihilated by their enemy.

Tony barely registered the scene before him when he first looked. "Oh, oh shit," he stuttered out when he understood. "Nat, get Jay to call a jet. We can't get him home like this."

"I already have," Nat said. She was subdued too, the whole battle having been disturbing, but more because she had done nothing to help anyone.

Strange took a long time to compose himself, and rightly so; he was in a lot of pain. "I can't beat him. Magically, I might be a match, but Loki's body is too quick and powerful."

"It's okay," Tony said hollowly. "He doesn't want help."

Nat's gauntlet rested on his shoulder, and Tony dipped his head.

-O.O-

The flight home was subdued at best.

None of them said a word on the flight to the Sanctum Sanctorum in New York, at least until Tony told JARVIS to be on alert for the tentacle vine's movements. Then they carried Strange in, his body a dead weight with half of it immobile, and took him upstairs to his study.

The room was lined with books and artefacts, clustered so closely together than the wall was only moderately visible, and a large plush chair took pride of place in the centre. They set him down there and immediately went about fetching items for him.

With the help of several magical artefacts' that he had hoarded from the Helicarrier's crash, much like Loki's retrieval of the crown, he performed a complex bit of magic. The feeling came back in his feet half a minute later.

"You may leave," Strange said shortly.

Tony nodded. Despite their common bond of being the only survivors, he clearly didn't want to associate with them. "Thank you," Tony said, nodding with respect. "And I'm sorry you got hurt."

After Nat had repeated similar sentiments, they left, neither of them planning on returning for any foreseeable reason.

-O.O-

Tony peeled himself out of his suit as soon as they were in the jet safe from the vine, and Nat did the same. When he just sat down and stared blankly at the floor, a moment of sadness played over Nat's face, and she came and sat next to him, pulling him into something of half a hug.

"It's okay to be hurt," Natasha murmured. She felt for him; thoughts of Loki had kept him going alone for a long time. "But I'm here."

Something warm, then cold, tapped her leg, and his shoulders shook with sobs.

"What did he say?" Nat asked. She'd heard the first bit, but had missed the finer details of what Loki had tried to say. Besides, she wanted to keep him out of his head, given that it was where the darkness was.

"He said he has nothing to live for," Tony said slowly. "'Cause he lost his magic and his family died. He wants me to get on with things."

Natasha intentionally held the kind of silence that would feel reassuring.

"I get what he means. I remember how depressed he was leading up to the Swarm. But -" Tony's voice cracked. "He didn't ask! I told him a million times how hard it was to watch him lose his mind, and he beat the shit out of me more once, and - that selfish prick just assumed it was worth it. Why is my life worth more than his?"

Nat gave him a squeeze. "He did, though."

"What?"

"He made that decision. Maybe it was selfish and maybe it hurt you a lot, but you can't change it." Nat put her hand on Tony's leg, rubbed it a little to ground him. "You have to deal."

When Tony finally replied, he was quiet. "I don't want to."

"But you will," Natasha insisted. "No easy way out."

"Yeah, yeah I will. And there isn't."

"Because he wouldn't kill you," Nat said.

Tony's eyes darted sideways. "Well, it was worth a shot."

"It wasn't," Natasha murmured. "I need you. Remember that."

The quiet turned from sad to companionable as they arrived at home and let themselves out of the jet. Only a few hours had passed since they'd left, but they were both exhausted from stress and Tony's first priority was to slump into bed. Natasha lazily followed him, not bothering to return to her own room.

-O.O-

When she woke up, Tony was gone. Some amused part of her brain linked this moment to one-night-stands she remembered from her briefing when she worked as his assistant.

The rest of her brain rolled her out of bed and sent her padding down to the workshop.

Tony, greasy, filthy and sweaty, was triumphantly doing the last bit of soldering in the circuitry of something that vaguely resembled a giant soil probe. His eyes flicked up when she walked in and met hers, an unusual gesture by Tony's standards. It took a quantity of humanity and groundedness he hadn't had for a long time.

"I've got it, Nat," Tony breathed.

"For the Bifrost?" Natasha guessed.

Tony nodded and grinned triumphantly, his energy and pep a direct contrast to how he'd been a few hours ago. "I figured out how to piggyback on past Bifrost uses. This should get us to Asgard, at least, and we should be able to travel wherever from there. They have fancy tech and spaceships there too, I think."

"C'mere and look," he insisted, and then proceeded to show her the guts of the device, which mostly made no sense to her at all. He then squeezed her into a tight, genuinely affectionate hug, and murmured gratitude. "I couldn't have pushed through without you."

"My pleasure," Natasha said dryly. It was, actually, and she liked the uncomplicated feeling of being needed. "So. Give me a few hours to pack my shit."

"We can't leave straight away," Tony corrected. "For one, I need equipment to keep the Maiden running, and lots of other stuff besides. And I need JARVIS to run this planet in our absence. And I need to do some work on the Candy Kingdom before I'd be happy letting them stand on their own appendages. So, you know, prolong the goodbye, for the next week at least."

"It's a deal," Nat replied. Tony made it seem like their leaving was going to be pretty final, or at least for a long time. She had some things she wanted to do, in that case. Her biological and geological work was not going to be wasted, or so she wanted to make sure. And, despite everything, she still loved the planet and wanted to take more of it in.

-O.O-

Once Natasha left his lab Tony dropped his energetic and playful countenance, but he still felt okay overall. He wasn't expecting that. The triumph of making a breakthrough had lightened his spirits.

Nat's words had helped, too. Without her there, he no doubt would have sunk into a deep gloom, but she'd reminded him of his purpose and he was determined to do her proud. Do Loki proud, too, because while a lot of him stung and smarted about what his lover had decided, he had no choice but to respect it.

Before he did any kind of technical preparation, he had a bit of baggage to tidy up.

Loki's room in his house, which the god had moved into after Tony's attempts to take the crown off him had made him paranoid, was only opened very occasionally these days, when Tony needed to brood. It was mostly dusty when he walked into there, clutching a piece of jewellery his mother had left behind.

He poked out a picture of Howard from the locket. Like he wanted that face looking at him.

In a pillowcase, where Tony left them out of habit, he found the notes Loki had written during his downwards spiral, in order to prompt his own memory.

Tony had looked at those notes so many times in the beginning that they were soft and wearing away at the edges. Normally his eyes were drawn to Loki's listing of symptoms, of describing his state of consciousness, so he could glean some understanding of how Loki's crackpot brain worked now.

This time, he just picked up one of the shorter notes, read it aloud, then held it to his heart.

_I love you, Tony._

That note, he folded up and slipped into a locket. The rest went into a drawer in Loki's bedroom. Hopefully he'd never look at them again.

Other things called.

-O.O-

This was it, the thousand-year anniversary of the destruction of Earth and the birth of Ooo.

Tony had spent varying period of time on Ooo in the last millennia, early on for Nat's sake and then to say goodbye to her, and later just as a holiday. While the wars were raging in his favourite systems in space, he'd decided to have a longer stay there than usual.

The vast majority of human structures had succumbed to nature, leaving only ruins. It was almost like travelling back in time, if not for broken shopping carts and cars rusted into nothing and random little artefacts like plastic spoons just turning up here and there.

The Sanctum Sanctorum was long-buried under the vine. Tony wondered if Strange was still alive, thanks to his magic, or if age wore him out too.

Ooo did not need him. It had so many different interplaying sentient species that Tony was weird, threatening, and redundant. Even his old Candy Kingdom haunt treated him as a curio, like an alien, no matter their shared history. It was simply too long a period for most of the short-lived inhabitants of the planet to really _get._

There was exactly one person who Tony wanted to see, anyway.

"Hey, Nice King," Tony jibed as he flew in the mouth of the King's lair.

"Ice King," the King corrected mulishly, before spotting him. "It's always robots with you people. Never a nice bit of ice."

Tony removed his helmet. "It's me. Anthony. How're you doing?"

"Great, great. I'm still looking, you know, but I think I'm getting close. It's on the tip of my tongue." Some would interpret that as a good sign, but considering remembrance had been on the tip of the King's tongue for the last couple of hundred years, Tony didn't take it as anything but more of the same. "I met some nice candy people the other day. They weren't nice to me, though. And I was just looking among them! Somebody ought to teach them some manners. Ho-hum. Did you miss me?"

The Ice King's 'looking' for his Praiseworthy Strength had probably been destructive and irritating as all heck, so Tony had no sympathy there.

Being remembered was also strange. It was like the Ice King knew, in the back of his mind, who Tony was, but his conscious brain mostly just skated past without a moment's attention.

"Always," Tony said, then settled down into a lounger of ice. This was okay.

He'd met a lot of people in the last thousand years and they'd all pre-deceased him. Years and years had been spent on endless scientific research, exploration, heroic endeavours. He didn't get hurt and he didn't need sleep; in the end, this just removed any urgency to what he was doing. Despite the fact he was generally respected and liked, he was always going to be some kind of freak once his abilities, or even worse, his history, came out.

One would think space would be kind of prepared for anyone. But that didn't always hold true.

His visits home were his one constant. Several of the candy people, Bubbles notably, were his still alive from his time. The Hulk was here. And so was the Ice King.

"Can I get you anything? I should play the gracious host," the Ice King said. "Oh, I'm all out of everything. My houseguests have been simply ravenous."

Snowfolk. Eating all of the Ice King's ice. Tony would have given it a miss anyway.

"I'm just here for the company, big guy," Tony smiled, and leaned back into the lounger.

No matter the decisions either of them had made a long, long time ago, Loki would still be his.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, thank you to my beta and artist, and thank you, dear reader, for finishing this series with me. I hope the ending lived up to whatever expectation there may have been.


End file.
